Romancing The Stone / The Jewel Of The Nile – DVD

In 1984 Romancing the Stone was a huge hit for director Robert Zemeckis (who later went on to make Forrest Gump, Contact and Castaway among others) thanks in no small part to the winning team of Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. The chemistry between all three stars is infectious, but Turner steals the show from the guys, playing a pushy romance novelist who gets stuck among some dangerous figures in Colombia and has only a rumpled guide (Michael Douglas) as an ally. Zemeckis--whose specialty at the time was creating set pieces of raucous action (as in his Back to the Future trilogy)--keeps things hopping with lots of kinetic material. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

The Jewel of the Nile is a moderately entertaining sequel that pales by comparison to its predecessor. Romance novelist Kathleen Turner and retired soldier-of-fortune Michael Douglas return as a now-complacent couple. Bored with life on a yacht, they find excitement thrust upon them when she accepts a speaking engagement in the Middle East. Once there, she is abducted and finds herself involved with the "jewel" everyone is chasing. Douglas teams up once more with Danny DeVito to rescue his love. Less charming and more predictable than the original, this suffers for one simple reason: the characters have nowhere to go. In the original story we watched Turner blossom from timid storyteller to lusty adventuress. In this flick she is too much like all the other action adventure babes we've seen before. The same trio of stars reunited to better effect in DeVito's dark comedy The War of the Roses.